Ninety minutes with Mo Yan (莫言), 2: Influences on his work:

In addition to discussing his two recent novels, LIFE AND DEATH ARE WEARING ME OUT and THE SANDALWOOD TORTURE at this year's Bookworm International Literary, Mo Yan talked about what has influenced him the most as a writer. And for me, getting the chance to ask him a question about this matter made the talk even more memorable.

As I noted in the previous post, Yan doesn't have much formal education. He was kicked out of elementary school during the 5th Grade for smoking a cigarette and never went to college or a university. It comes then as no surpise, that the biggest influence (影响) on his work has been the story telling narratives spun by ordinary people, Laobaixing (老百姓), in his home town of Gaomi (高密) in Shandong (山东) province.

All writers are certainly influenced by their immediate surroundings and draw from them. However, I suspect this is especially so for Mo Yan. In any case, Yan emphatically stated that afternoon that his fiction has first and foremost drawn upon the oral histories told by his hometown's Laobaixing. He further stated that writers are like bandits and stake out their own territory.

If that's the case, then Yan has surely claimed Gaomi (高密) and the surrounding area, which is located near Qingdao (青岛). He has done so in much the same way as Raymond Chandler claimed Los Angeles, circa 1938-1953, Zhang Ailing (张爱玲) claimed 1930s and 1940s Shanghai and Günter claimed Danzig (present-day Gdansk) before and during the Second World War. And since Yan's writing draws so heavily from this area's folk drama, it's very colloquial (口语的; 通俗的) and coarse, as well as not so grammatically correct.

Yan stated that critics (文艺评论家) who fault him for having a rough and unpolished (粗糙) writing style (风格) miss the point of his writing, which is to use the language of the local Laobaixing (老百姓). Thus Yan's work is peppered with lots of Shandong dialect (山东话) and its peculiar slang (俚语; 口语) words.

One commentary I read on the internet while doing a bit of research for this and the other Mo Yan posts called his style a “skillful imitation of folk opera—a splendid street performance full of sound and imagery leaving nothing to the imagination.” This commentary noted that Yan has been heavily influenced by this area of Shandong Province's unique form of opera. This opera has a so-called “cat tone”—as one might guess, the singing mimicks a cat's yowling—and is performed at funerals, weddings and religious ceremonies.

The commentary, which was done by Yue Tao, the Chinese Affairs coordinator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, added that the roughness of Yan's language and its lowbrow style “charms many Chinese”. And referring to THE SANDALWOOD TORTURE, Tao added that because of this style, the novel “is not a clichéd (陈词滥调) anti-colonial (抗殖民) class struggle (阶级斗争) story (故事)”.

Of course the grandfather of Yan's writing style is the great early 20th Century Chinese author Lu Xun (鲁迅). Xun vigorously championed replacing classical Chinese (古文), which had previously been used in literary writing, with ordinary vernacular (白话) language.

During his talk, Yan also noted that Lu was one inspiration behind his recent novel, THE SANDALWOOD TORTURE. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, Yan stated that one purpose of this work was to mediate on the morality of capital punishment. Yan thus mentioned in his talk the famous incident that caused Lu to give up a career in medicine and turn to writing. After moving to Japan in 1906, where he lived for several years, Lu saw, in an early movie theater, a crude newsreel showing a Chinese man being beheaded (斩首) by the Russians to serve as an “example” to the local people. The writer was upset not just by the execution (处决), but by the large numbers of Chinese people watching and enjoying the spectacle.

The Wikipedia entry on Lu Xun also mentions this event and quotes Lu's feelings about it. Lu wrote that the Chinese spectators were “physically healthy” but “their expressions revealed all too clearly that spiritually, they were calloused and numb”. Yan noted in his talk that after this incident, Lu decided that he should try to cure the sick minds of the Chinese through his writing, rather than heal their bodies.

In making this comment, Yan noted that since his novels contain a lot of violence, many critics have speculated that he himself is a cruel and violent individual. However, Yan told us that he is really a very timid (胆小) person. As Yan put it, “I dare not even kill a chicken”.

Yan mentioned another Chinese literary influence on his work during the talk. This writer is the Qing Dynasty author, Pu Songling (蒲松龄), who wrote a book entitled STRANGE STORIES FROM A CHINESE STUDIO (聊斋志异). These tales featured animals turning into humans, particularly foxes becoming women. Yan stated his tale of reincarnation in LIFE AND DEATH ARE WEARING ME OUT, in which the protagonist is successively reborn as different animals, was partially inspired by Pu's work.

The highlight of the talk for me was getting the opportunity to ask Yan a question—indeed, there was time for just one question and I got to ask it. The works of Yan I have read, RED SORGHUM and the short story compilation, SHIFOU, YOU'LL DO ANYTHING FOR A LAUGH, had always struck me as being quite similar to 1970s and 1980s Latin American “magical realism” fiction. I really didn't know before asking this question that Yan has, in fact, been dubbed as China's answer to the leading exponent of “magical realism,” the great Columbian (哥伦比亚) novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (马尔克斯).

Yan stated that he has indeed read Marquez and has been influenced by the author's work (since Yan doesn't know any foreign languages, he reads Chinese translations of this literature). In particular, he said that it took him slightly more than two decades to get through Marquez's most famous novel (小说), ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (百年孤獨). After hearing that, I didn't feel quite so bad about my initial struggles to read that book. It was only after the second go that I was able to appreciate that ONE HUNRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is indeed a great work of literature. However, I still believe that Marquez's later and other well-known novel, LOVE IN THE TIME CHOLERA (霍乱时期的爱情) is much more accessible.

In talking about Marquez's work, Yan told us that he finally finished ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE after 21 years because he had been invited to a conference in Tokyo in which Maquez was the other featured writer. Yan said that since Marquez was going to be there, he felt that he'd better finish reading the novel.

Yan also said that he likes the American author William Faulkner (福克纳). But he also confessed to struggling with Faulkner's best known novel, THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Indeed, Yan said that unlike the Marquez novel, he has never been able to finish that work. Yan added that he would probably never finish this novel, as Faulkner has long been dead, so there is no chance of appearing with him at a conference (I have to confess that I've never been able to get into Faulkner—too many long sentences, too much Southern Gothic for my liking!).

Yan's answer to my question shows that he is a very modest and self-deprecating kind of individual. Unlike many authors who become insufferably pretentious after achieving fame, Yan doesn't seem to have a pretentious bone in his body. He's still very much a laobaixing, but a laobaixing who just happens to be one of China's and indeed the world's greatest writers.

The Chinese characters used in this post, along with their Romanized spelling (Pinyin) and tones are listed below. A number 1 indicates that the character has a flat tone, a number 2, a rising tone, a number 3, a falling rising tone, a number 4, a falling tone, and a number 5, a neutral tone.

影响 (ying3xiang3). “影” on its own means “shadow” and it appears in the Chinese word for movie, “电影” (dian4ying3), which literally means “electronic (电) shadow (影)”. “响” on its own means “sound” or “resonate”.
口语; 通俗的 (kou3yu3; tong1su2de). “口语” can also be translated as “oral (口) language”, with the “口” character resembling an opening, like a mouth. “通” is the word for “common”, while the “俗” character appears in the Chinese word for “custom(s)” (风俗; feng1su2).
文艺评论家 (wen2yi4ping2lun4jia1). “文艺” means “literature and art”, while “评论” is one Chinese word for “criticize” or “criticism”; the other two are “批评” (pi1ping2) 批判 (pi1pan4). The “家” suffix denotes that someone who is a qualified expert to do a particular task.
粗糙 (cu1cao1). One could also say that Yan's writing lacks embellishment or refinement. These adjectives can be translated into Mandarin as “加修饰” (jia1xiu1shi4).
风格 (feng1ge2). Unlike English, Mandarin has separate words for writing and artistic style, or “风格”, and style, as in clothing style. The word for the latter is “样式” (yang4shi4).
俚语; 口语 (li3yu3; kou3yu3). “语” is in the Chinese word for language “语言”. Readers can notice that the “口” character appears at the bottom right hand side of “语” and at the bottom of “言”, providing a clue about the meaning of these characters.
陈词滥调 (chen1ci2lan4diao4). This is also the Chinese word for “hackneyed” and “stale” (in the verbal sense).
抗殖民 (kang4zhi2min2). “抗” means “anti-/against”, while “殖民” is the word for “colonial”.
阶级斗争 (jie1ji2dou4zheng1). “阶级” is the word for “class”, while “争” means “struggle” and appears in the Chinese term for “war/conflict” (战争; zhan4zheng1).
故事 (gu4shi4).
古文 (gu3wen2). This literally means “very old/ancient/classical (古) language (文)”.
白话 (bai2hua4). And this term literally means “plain/pure (白) speech/talk (话)”. “白” is also the word for “white”.
斩首 (zhan3shou3). “斩” on its own means “chop”, while “首” is one Chinese word for “head” (“头” [tou2] is more commonly used in other phrases and sentences).
处决 (chu3jue2).
胆小 (dan3xiao3). “胆” on its own means “courage” and “audacity”, while “小” is one way of saying “small”. So the term literally means “lacking/small in courage”.
聊斋志异 (liao4zhai1zhi4yi4). “聊” on its own mean “to converse” or “conversation” and “斋” is a shortened form of the word for “studio” (吃斋; chi1zhai1). “志异” is the word for “fabulous tales”.
哥伦比亚 (ge1lun2bi3ya4). This transliteration actually sounds pretty much like “Columbia”. 马尔克斯 (ma3er2ke4si1). It's very important to say the rising tone “er” “尔” here; otherwise your Chinese listeners might think you're talking about Karl Marx. The Chinese transliterations of Marquez and Marx's names sound almost alike, with the former being “马克思” (ma3ke4si1). The Chinese word for “Marxism” is “马克思主义” (ma3ke4si1zhu3yi4). “主义” means “ism” or “doctrine”.
小说 (xiao3shuo1). This literally means “small (小) speaking (说);” since many novels are hardly small, the logic behind this character combination, unlike many of the others in Mandarin, has always baffled me.
百年孤獨 (bai3nian2gu1du2). “百年” means “100 (白) years (年)”, while “孤獨” means “solitude”.
霍乱时期的爱情 (huo4luan4dshi2qi1de 5ai4qing2). “霍乱” is cholera, “时期” means “time” in the sense of a period or era, and “爱情” is “love affair”.
福克纳 (fu2ke4na4).